Swift backlash: Country singer finds more fame, more critics

Published: Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 9:20 a.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 9:20 a.m.

Country music’s precocious princess has become a grown-up queen of popular music.

And royalty, as Taylor Swift would probably attest, always has a target on its back.

It’s been just two years since we last saw Swift amid her evolution from sweet country hit-maker to assertive pop presence. A performance at Detroit’s Ford Field was just her second stadium performance.

But two years might as well be a couple of lifetimes. Swift now is a transformed public figure — a dominant, domineering celebrity who’s enduring slings and arrows to go with her outrageous fortune.

There’s no denying Swift’s staggering success: Her fourth record, “Red,” bowed in October with 1.2 million copies sold, the biggest album debut in a decade. Her 2012 income was estimated by Forbes magazine at $57 million, ranking her just behind Britney Spears as the top-earning female in music. Earlier this week, TMZ reported that the 23-year-old superstar just laid out $18 million in cash for a waterside mansion in Rhode Island.

Her Red Tour, which started in March, has found Swift defiantly looking forward. It’s an evening of tight outfits and rock-star moves, with a set list dominated by the genre-busting material of “Red,” which completed Swift’s long-brewing metamorphosis into pop diva. Only two or three numbers are plucked from her old teenage catalog of sun-kissed country.

The transformation hasn’t sat well with everyone. Indeed, between her musical shift and her vivid, restless personal life, a public backlash has begun to simmer.

She’s been increasingly knocked for her prolific commercial endorsements, now including Diet Coke. The glossy pop sizzle of “Red” has left some longtime country fans disgruntled. Swift’s high-profile parade of celebrity boyfriends — their breakups reliably chronicled in song — has become a staple of gossip mags and running fodder for the late-night shows.

All came to a head at January’s Golden Globes show, when comics Amy Poehler and Tina Fey poked fun at the young singer’s romantic revolving door — prompting Swift to hit back by declaring “there’s a special place in hell” for such female critics.

If Swift is now widely viewed as fair game, it marks a rapid shift in the public mood: Just three years ago, the world’s protective instincts seemed to kick in all at once, when Kanye West’s interruption of Swift’s MTV awards speech saw him portrayed as the wolf to her innocent fawn.

Disc jockey “Dr. Don” Carpenter of WYCD-FM (99.5) has had a unique vantage point through it all. In 2006, his morning show hosted the 16-year-old Swift’s first live radio appearance, shortly before the puppy-love single “Tim McGraw” propelled her to national success. He and the station have remained tight with the starlet and her camp, even as her career has broadened well beyond the country world.

Carpenter, who regularly visits Detroit area schools to conduct student writing workshops, says Swift’s young critics have emerged in just the past couple of years. And the backlash may be spawned simply by the sheer scale of Swift’s fame — the fact that she’s become practically inescapable.

“We’ve always discussed Taylor and the fact that she writes some songs. When she was first out, you couldn’t get people to stop cheering,” he says. “Now you get a piece of the room that groans. I don’t know which side of the room that is, exactly — the pop fans? the country fans? — but it’s probably the part of the room that was silent the first time.”

But the truth is, in the grand scheme of Swift’s career, the drama probably doesn’t hurt — and indeed might only help. In a popular culture that thrives on controversy, always thirsting for the next bit of titillation, Swift could be well-served by a drumbeat of spicy headlines to go with the hits.

It may not be an accident. Carpenter says that even as a teen, Swift was one of the most naturally intelligent figures he’d ever encountered in music.

The tension and drama are “brilliant,” he says. “Don’t you think she knows that? I think a lot of it is more carefully contrived than people think. She’s a lot more in control of her career than people might realize.

“She went into this playing to a group of girls in junior high. What do you do when they hit high school? When they hit college? Well, this is what you do!”

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